Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland y First printing Edition

by Lawrence Goodwyn (Author)

4 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0195061222

ISBN-10: 0195061225

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In the last year the world has been electrified as one Soviet bloc government after another has collapsed. The Berlin Wall has been dismantled and Germany reunited, Vaclav Havel went from the prisons to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarian people have dismantled the one-party state. But ten full years before any of these tumultuous events came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike which began in Gdansk, and which led to the formation of the first free and independent trade union in the communist world, Solidarnosc.
Now, in Breaking the Barrier, Lawrence Goodwyn provides a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement, tracing thirty-five years of working class activism and state repression that preceded and defined the climactic struggle of 1980 on the Baltic coast of Poland. Goodwyn demonstrates the extent to which Solidarnosc grew out of the workers themselves, not out of intellectual theories. He describes the strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and shows how they provided workers with the knowledge to create Solidarnosc. Indeed in 1980, when they formulated and bargained for twenty-one demands which shocked even sympathetic observers, the workers proved themselves far better political strategists than the elite intellectuals of the "democratic opposition" who came to advise them. Moreover, Goodwyn does not simply recount these dramatic events. In his gripping narrative, the movement comes alive: we see Lech Walesa standing up to the powers of a physically and politically intimidating bureaucracy; we watch the difficult emergence of an alliance between the workers and Warsaw intellectuals, as the strikers adamantly refuse to compromise their demand for free unions, and we find touching portraits of the martyred priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, and the dissident, Adam Michnik.
In the epilogue, Goodwyn offers a provocative critique of Poland and Eastern Europe today, in which he defines the distance still to be traversed to fulfill the democratic legacy of the early years of Solidarnosc. Based on personal interviews with Polish workers and intellectuals, as well as extensive historical research, this vivid interpretation of collective heroism and government corruption will interest anyone who has been amazed by the democratic revolutions in the East and who wants to know the real story of how it all began.

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Goodwyn, a professor at Duke University, is a historian of American social movements who has studied Poland's Solidarity movement since 1982. Through interviews with emigres, he traces the development of the organizational skills and consensus of demands among working-class Poles that allowed Solidarity to be successful without input from the Polish intelligentsia. He is highly critical of such authors as Jadwiga Staniszkis ( Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, LJ 5/1/84) and Jacek Kuron who ascribe the initial success of the August 1980 shipyard strikes to the leadership and assistance of the intelligentsia. Goodwyn states his case convincingly and sheds new light on postwar Polish history. Academic collections and others collecting extensively on Solidarity should add this for its new insights.
- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

About the Author:
Lawrence Goodwyn is Professor of History at Duke University. A specialist in social movements, he is author of the definitive study of the American Populist movement, Democratic Promise, also published by Oxford.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; y First printing edition (May 2, 1991)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195061225
ISBN-13: 978-0195061222
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,015,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #59171 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > History
- #60323 in Books > History > Europe
- #102704 in Books > History > World

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Top Customer Reviews

fantastic & sadly out-of-print

By Hayden Childs on October 18, 1999

Format: Hardcover

As a student in Larry Goodwyn's social movements class, I have been reading this book to study his philosophy and methodology. It's incredibly interesting and enlightening, and sure to infuriate anyone with a vested interest in the convential wisdom about movement building in general and Solidarity in particular. I'd recommend it to anyone who can get their hands on a copy (& let me know if you can!)...

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Superb analysis of a genuinely democratic mass movement

By A Customer on November 24, 2002

Format: Hardcover

This is a superb book. It is scholarly yet passionate, courageous yet level-headed. The book argues that the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in 1980-81 was created by workers of the Gdansk shipyards rather than by Warsaw and Krakow intellectuals. However, the intellectuals supplied self-serving interpretations of Solidarity, and these were accepted as fact. Goodwyn shows that ever since the failed bread strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, the workers of Poland continued to devise methods by which to oppose the communist regime. In 1980, they succeeded: the so-called "occupational strike" in the shipyards made it impossible for the police to disperse the workers, while a system of human couriers allowed workers from various enterprises (as many as 370 factories, at the end of August 1980) to communicate when telephones were cut off by the communists. Finally, in August 1980, the workers presented to the government the centerpiece of all their demands: the demand for free labor unions. This was a move which the government of Soviet-occupied Poland did not expect. Polish intellectuals in Warsaw advised against it. The workers stood firm--and the government yielded. For a year, there was jubilation in Poland. But at Moscow's bidding, the Soviet-controlled government in Warsaw arrested thousands of Solidarity leaders in December 1981. For seven years, Poles lived under martial law. Under martial law, hundreds of people were tortured or "merely" beaten, thousands lost their lives because elementary medical help was impossible to obtain.
In later chapters, Goodwyn points out that it was "citizens' committees" and not the Solidarity labor union that produced delegates to the Round Table talks.Read more ›

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Sadly forgotten -

By R. L. Huff on November 8, 2012

Format: Hardcover

- in both Poland and the USA, Poland's Solidarity movement has been buried under Reagan-era stereotypes, overtaken by fundamentalist nationalism, and sold out on the "free market" by its opportunistic vanguard. Yet in reliving Solidarity's glory days historian Lawrence Goodwyn - known for his treatment of American populism - offered the most in-depth analysis of democracy itself, against the background of the most democratic social movement in postwar Europe. So fundamental was the reach of Polish Solidarity in touching the human core of its host society that it exposed not only the pretensions of "people's" democracy, but the hollowness of the West's own staid Sunday-go-to-meeting ritualism. In Poland in 1980 it was ordinary *people* connecting - not parties, NGOs, nor through a mass movement united by a "great leader" (Walesa's hagiographers to the contrary.) For a few brief months, until overtaken by hunger and fatigue and crushed from above, Poland was a truly self-governing democratic republic in the most basic sense - One Big Union, as in the old syndicalist phrase. Whether this could have lasted, or served only as a transition to something less ideal, will never be known. This is why I bother reviewing this book long - and sadly - out of print.

But I must offer some obverse caveats about Solidarity, Poland, and Goodwyn's treatment of both. For all of Poland's official Marxism-Leninism, it was yet a far freer and civil society than the formal democracies of Central America. A Salvadoran Lech Walesa would have ended up decapitated in a body dump in the summer of 1980, with Ronald Reagan looking the other way if not nodding to his executioners.Read more ›

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The Way Out for American Workers

By Thomas J. Laney on June 15, 2010

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

As the U.S. Catholic Bishops are reporting 39 MILLION Americans in poverty, American workers continue to watch their jobs outsourced and wages slashed. Our unions are awash in Corporatism and have become the purveyors of economic terrorism. Where do we turn?

To each other!

What's really needed is a sense of confidence in our own abilities to think about what Solidarity really should mean and then trust each other to organize a new Solidarity Movement. That confidence can be had in this book!

Americans know that we need an economy that serves all our families and communities. If they read this book, they will see that Polish workers understood that as well and did something about it. They went about criss-crossing their country, meeting each other and forming a movement so powerful it brought down the Communists.

This book is a road-map to proving to the Common Man and Woman that we can win the Solidarity Society.

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